Meet CWE architectural designer Rocio Romero

One of Rocio Romero’s LVM Homes was recently featured in HGTV’s Extreme Small Spaces. To watch the video and learn more about “The Copper House” click here.

The photograph of Rocio Romero, above, taken last summer against a backdrop of bright-green rhododendron, may throw you for a loop in this wintry weather, but I've been saving this post for a time when you might be thinking about spring and new beginnings. Instead of plotting your garden, perhaps you might dream of a plot of ground on which to build a prefab home designed by Rocio, a nationally-renowned architect who calls the CWE home.

The first time I realized Rocio had St. Louis connections was in the fall of 2008 at an event in her honor at Centro Modern Furnishings on McPherson.  "An Evening with Rocio Romero," a "Fab Party" celebrating Rocio's prefab architecture, benefited Gallery 210 at UM-St. Louis.

In 1999, equipped with a masters degree from LA's Sci-Arc (a California girl with a degree from Berkeley), Rocio designed a house for her parents in Laguna Verde, a beach town in Chile (where her parents were born). The house came in over budget. That's when Rocio realized that building a house from scratch (stick-built) very often means costs can get away from you. In order to have control over quality,  precision, and cost – and to have a consistent product – she determined that her contemporary designs should be prefab and created in a factory. As she said last summer, “The way to build with craft in mind is through the factory.”

At first Rocio was politely turned down by all the manufacturers she contacted, until she found several companies to fabricate different components for the LV (Laguna Verde) in Missouri and Kansas. Several of them still manufacture her product to this day. To keep costs down, she designed all the materials to fit on one truck. Her prefab homes (160 to date) are scattered across the country. Most of her clients are on the coasts -  4 are in L.A., 1 in Pacifica outside San Francisco. The first purchasers live in Virginia, many live in the Catskills, and several more are in the Midwest.

When asked how an architect of contemporary structures likes living in a three-story home built at the beginning of the last century, Rocio replied that she's adjusting (to the house, not to the CWE, which she loves). Her husband, Cale Bradford, a healthcare executive, and her two young children are very comfortable living in a house with ornate moulding and a bit of age to it.

 
Rocio and Cale also own property in Perryville, Missouri, where Rocio built one of her LV houses (a version of which is pictured above), to be used as a weekend getaway. She has also designed and built the Fish Camp on the property, a one-room prefab house that is no longer in production.

Last summer as I was paging through Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger's Building Up and Tearing Down, Reflections on the Age of Architecture, I came across a chapter titled Some Assembly Required (read it here), a 2005 New Yorker article Goldberger wrote about his trip to Perryville to meet Rocio Romero. When I asked her last summer how that trip came to be, she replied that Goldberger had been so intrigued by Rocio's LV (Laguna Verde) house as featured in Dwell magazine that he wanted to come see it. She was extremely nervous when he came to Perryville in 2005, as she had no idea how he felt about her design, and she knew he was an extremely tough critic. Goldberger was inquisitive and did not reveal how he felt at the time. In the article that followed however, Goldberger wrote glowingly about the 1,150 s.f. LV with its two bedrooms, two baths, large living-dining area and small kitchen. He also spoke very highly of the architect herself in the New Yorker article.

  When we met I asked Rocio if she could envision one of her prefab structures constructed in the neighborhood. She said that would be a dream come true and that the LV2 above would work well as infill housing in an urban environment. Contrary to what you might think about the housing stock in the CWE, there are several contemporary houses that have been constructed in the neighborhood. Here is information on the process and costs.

If purchasers of the LV or custom designs are amenable, Rocio travels to hold open houses in finished houses. (Purchasers are the architectural designer's biggest fans.) The general contractor comes along to answer any questions about the building process. If you would like to visit or learn more about the prefab homes, contact Rocio for information.

Near the end of Goldberger's article in The New Yorker he quotes Rocio as saying, "One of my clients calls this (the LV house) her poor man's Mies (van der Rohe). I always wonder if I should take that as a compliment. To be compared to Mies is one thing, but to be called the poor man?" She paused. "But I want this to be affordable," she said. "I want to bring modern design to people. Otherwise, what's the point of prefab?"